MOSS LANDING — Elkhorn Slough has received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which will be used to help restore approximately 63 acres—about 83 football fields—of tidal wetlands at the Slough.

“Elkhorn Slough is a wetland of global importance,” said Shawn Milar, Coastal Program Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, citing a recent designation made by the Ramsar Convention of Wetlands. The Ramsar Convention, an international treaty, is responsible for evaluating and designating globally significant wetlands habitats. The Slough’s restoration is thus important for many people, not only in the local area but globally as well.

The grant is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant Program, which is designed to enhance and restore more than 2,000 acres of the United States’ coastal wetland habitats. The program generated $20 million primarily from taxes collected from the fuel sales of recreational boaters, anglers and hunters. In all, the monies are set to fund 22 coastal restoration projects in 11 states, including, in addition to California, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Washington.

Additional funds — equaling a $26.7 million — have been pledged by state and local governments, private landholders, and conservation groups.

The Elkhorn Slough in Moss Landing has received a $1 million grant for wetlands restoration. (Vern Fisher – Monterey Herald file)

The $1 million earmarked for Elkhorn Slough has been awarded to the California State Coastal Conservancy, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation, the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We’re able to do so much more because we have this partnership,” says Dave Feliz, the Reserve Manager at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve.

All of these have been working in concert to restore tidal marsh habitat at Elkhorn Slough near Moss Landing since 2010 when the first phase of restoration began. The new monies will continue to fund the second phase of this process, which will focus on restoring those 63 acres near the southern end of the Slough.

Elkhorn Slough is California’s second-largest tidal salt marsh, after San Francisco Bay. It is 7 miles long and covers nearly 3,000 acres or 4 square miles. Ecologically diverse, it is home to a variety of plants, such as pickleweed and eelgrass, as well as seabirds, wading birds, fish, shellfish, sea otters, and other mammals.

“We will move about 200,000 cubic yards of soil into degraded marshland,” says Monique Fountain, the director of the Tidal Wetlands Program at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. “This is a marsh area that was historically diked and drained and, as a result, has subsided.”

Subsided land is too low to support a healthy marsh, Fountain adds. The addition of soil will raise it up to an elevation that can support a thriving ecology. A variety of native plants and perennial grasses, including purple needlegrass, creeping wildrye, meadow barley, California brome, rush and salt grass, will then be planted.

“What we will end up with,” Fountain says, “is a native dominated grassland.”

The hope is that this restored habitat will attract other species – such as birds, insects, and mammals. For example, a thriving wetland is especially conducive for sea otters, which are listed as a “threatened” species according to the Endangered Species Act. “We’re continuing to expand habitat that sea otters like,” Fountain says.

Elkhorn Slough is part of the Pacific Flyway. This is a major north-south route along the west coast of North America for hundreds of species of migratory birds. “This will help improve that habitat for them,” Fountain says.

Importantly, the raised and restored habitat will be sustainable into the future. “It will make the estuary more resilient to climate change,” she says.

A combination of urban development, agricultural projects, and dam and dike construction have decimated California’s once extensive coastal estuaries. Since the mid-nineteenth century, these factors have destroyed over 90 percent of California’s coastal wetlands.

Elkhorn Slough has been hit particularly hard. Over the last century and a half, farms built in the area have destroyed approximately 50 percent of the Slough’s habitat, transforming once productive and thriving marshland into mudflats.

Wetlands and estuaries are vital in the global battle to curb and allay the effects of global warming, scientists say. They think that marine and coastal environments –– such as mangrove swamps, seagrass meadows, and tidal marshlands –– are excellent areas for the “capturing and holding” of carbon, a process known as carbon sequestration. Most of the carbon captured in these habitats is stored in plants and soil. Although coastal environments comprise only 2 percent of the world’s ocean area, they nonetheless account for half of the carbon typically stored by ocean environments.

More in California News

"I fully support the principles behind Senate Bill 1: to defeat efforts by the president and Congress to undermine vital federal protections that protect clean air, clean water and endangered species," Newsom said in a written statement.

Attorneys for eight drug distributors, pharmacies and retailers facing trial next month for their roles in the opioid crisis want to disqualify the federal judge overseeing their cases, saying he has shown bias in his effort to obtain a multibillion-dollar global settlement.